The Y word goes from amusing to abusing

The self-mocking nickname of Spurs fans, Jew and gentile alike, is no longer a
joke, writes Matthew Norman.

The hoary issue of racism in football rears its head once again, although this time with a twist. The targets of hatred being defended in this case are not black players, but Jews. Not Jewish footballers, obviously, because there aren’t enough of those to sate the racist appetite. As everyone knows, the second shortest book ever published (after The Alan Sugar Guide to Modern Manners) is the Global Compendium of Jewish Sports Stars.

No, this time the victims are the supporters of Tottenham Hotspur, the club with the vast Jewish following to which I myself belong. The West Stand at White Hart Lane has always struck me as less a sporting venue than a misrouted synagogue, albeit far quieter and more sombre. Whenever Spurs score in the first 10 minutes, as Howard Jacobson observed, you can just about hear 7,000 fretful voices whispering, “Too early… it’s much too early.”

As David Baddiel and his brother Ivan have clarified in a one-minute film called The Y Word – Y standing for “yid” and its kissing cousin “yiddo” – this unusual footballing demographic caught the attention of rival fans long ago. Some, notably the followers of Chelsea and Leeds United, like to serenade Tottenham counterparts with carefully nuanced lyrics, and hissing intended to replicate the release of Zyklon B into the gas chambers.

A dozen years ago, I wrote about this after Leeds visited White Hart Lane, and was asked on to a Radio 5 Live phone-in. The first caller, Alan from Leeds, had a complaint. “Tell that journalist,” said Alan to Nicky Campbell, “that he’s got us wrong. We never sing 'Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz/ Hitler’s gonna kill ’em again’,” he corrected. “It’s 'Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz/ Hitler’s gonna gas ’em again’.”

Sometimes, when bang to rights, what can you do but ask forgiveness? “Alan, I’m dreadfully sorry,” I cooed. “There’s nothing more hurtful than having your neo-Nazi chant misquoted.” Alan, to his credit, accepted the apology with good grace.

Twelve years on, despite the success in quieting abuse of black players with rigorous police surveillance and stewarding, the elegances targeted at Jews continue, as the Baddiels point out, barely abated.

I cannot say all of us will agree that this is not acceptable, because no doubt a few sharply anti-Semitic comments will appear beneath this article on the website, as posted by that tiny cabal of sad creatures – nebbishes in the Yiddish – who pepper every online newspaper message board with their pungent insights. That is their right. As a believer in positive discrimination, it would be gross hypocrisy to argue that the impotently enraged and the plain deranged be denied their voice.

The massive majority, however, will regard support for the Führer’s reincarnation and his method of industrial genocide as poor form that should be stamped out, if necessary by the application of the law.

Where things become more complicated is in regard to the sequestering of the “Y” word by the Spurs fans, goyim as well as Jews, who identify themselves as “Tottenham Yids” and “Yid Army”. Here the field of racial nomenclature finds us on familiarly treacherous terrain. Clearly, it is repugnant for a white person to use poisonous words about a black one, and for homophobes to taunt gay people with terms meant to wound. But should we take umbrage when black people use the “n” word, and gay men “queer”, of themselves? Does the appropriation of nasty nouns by their intended victims validate their use by would-be persecutors, or draw their venom by ridiculing both the words and the sweethearts who use them?

This might be styled the Alf Garnett Conundrum. Writer Johnny Speight intended Alf, whose range of racist terminology made him a pioneering equal opportunities offender, to satirise such ignorance, while Alf, who used “the Y word” with such abandon, was played by a Jewish actor. Warren Mitchell was a neighbour, in fact, and often took my boyish self to Spurs when he had a spare ticket. Along with the cry of “Eh, Alf, why ain’t you down the Hammers?”, Warren was occasionally greeted on the walk to the ground with a cheery “Watch yourself, Alf, there’s loads of yids round ’ere.” He never took the slightest offence, because the tone was invariably warm and jocular, and nor did I. Had the comment been made outside Upton Park, home of Alf’s beloved West Ham, it would have been different. Not every lovable cockney marched against Mosley in Cable Street, or felt fondly towards the heroic defenders of liberty who did.

Tone is always king in these matters, and while that can be a devilishly difficult thing to discern, even the most cloth-eared would understand that the chant of “yids” from the mouths of Spurs fans is proudly affectionate where on the lips of the Chelsea faithful it is vicious and menacing.

With the Passover and its remembrance of Egyptian bondage upon us, it may seem tasteless to associate the Children of White Hart Lane with the enslaved (although after our Champions League calamity against Real Madrid, a tiny shard of victimhood is surely permissible).

Yet what are gentile Spurs fans saying when they sing of themselves as “yids” if not “I am Spartacus”? And which of us doesn’t well up at the end of the movie when we hear Kirk Douglas’s compadre rebels, one by one, say that?